Probably A Good Excuse To Charterize Schools In 8 States

Never let a disaster or catastrophe go unused.

That's what Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan always say.

And as Arne Duncan once noted, the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans was the Hurricane Katrina destruction, because it allowed the public school system to be privatized.

Wonder what he's got planned for the eight southern states that saw devastation from the weather?

Walcott Prays With Teachers

First, here's the story from the Post:

After the disastrously brief stint of ousted Cathie Black, teachers this morning implored the Almighty to watch over the city’s new school chancellor Dennis Walcott, who officially starts his job tomorrow.

The public school teachers – worshipping with Walcott at Harvest Fields Community Church in The Bronx – placed their hands on the Education Department’s new honcho at a Palm Sunday mass and asked God to steer him in the right direction.

“It’s great to see you guys here because, actually, I’m your boss,” Walcott said. “We’re in tough times and you work very hard and I will never say anything bad about you

“You make all the difference for our children and I will always sing your praises,” he added.

Walcott walks into the role facing the possibility of over 6,000 teacher layoffs.

“We have to look at what’s in the best interest of our schools and with me that starts tomorrow,” he said at the East Tremont Avenue church.

Now the snark:

I wouldn't want to attend the same services as Walcott and have to "lay hands on him" because I doubt I would be able to refrain from choking the hypocritical son of a bitch to knock some sense into him or at least knock the hypocrisy out.

If Walcott cares so much about teachers and children, why spend all that money on no-bid technology and testing contracts that get filled in Turkey when the money could be used to pay for the 6,000 teachers he plans to lay off?

You know why?

Because he doesn't care about children, students or schools.

He is there to carry out Bloomberg's privatization and union-busting agenda.

Which is fine - Cathie Black and Joel Klein were also there to carry that agenda out,

But for anybody to think differently about that - including the teachers who "worshipped" with him this morning - is short-sighted and dangerous.

Ruben Brosbe

Gotham Schools has a habit of scrubbing my comments at their site, so I want to post this comment I put up about Ruben Brosbe:

Ruben created all the animosity when he agreed to write his “TDR reports are useful” jive in the Post. Ruben says these reports are helpful and can make teachers better by pointing out short comings. Except that the TDRs have a 35% margin of error if two years of test score data is used, a 25% margin of error if 5 years of test score data is and a 12% margin of error if 10 years of test score data is used.

Unlike Ruben, I am less enamored of allowing myself to be publicly evaluated with a rating system that veers between a 12% and a 35% margin of error.

As I have said before, you can be sure Bloomberg wouldn’t trust a company that has a 12%-35% margin of error in its financial reportings. Obama wouldn’t trust a political poll with a 12% MOE (let alone 35%!). So why should the public be given teacher ratings with these kinds of margins of errors? Why should teachers be subject to public slandering with false, inaccurate data?

The powers that be don’t say. Neither do collaborators like Ruben Brosbe.

Dunno if Ruben is just a naive young man or if he is looking to cash in on some of that hedge fund and bankster largesse his E4E colleagues have cashed in on (must be nice to retire after two years teaching with a Whitney Tilson-paid consulting gig!).

Either way, as a ten year vet who wants to continue his career in teaching, I will stand up against people like Ruben Brosbe who actively look to destroy the teaching profession by giving a veneer of legitimacy to a teacher ranking system that is error-ridden jive.

There - got that down.

What is it with Gotham Schools and scrubbing?

They must not like me.

Poor RBE.

I guess if I was more like Ruben Brosbe, I could get published at GS and not have my comments scrubbed.

Heck, if I was more like Ruben, maybe I could get in on some of the hedge fundie and bankster ed deform largesse too.

Come to think of it, why don't we ALL sell out like Ruben and his Asshat4Educator pals and rake in the dough?

Oh, right - I like to sleep at night knowing I'm not evil.

Maybe you feel the same way.

Fenty Staffer: "Adrian Fenty Is One Of The Biggest Assholes I've Ever Met In My Life."

No wonder DC mayor Adrian Fenty is down 5 points in a race he should be winning.

People hate him.

Seriously, people hate him.

Especially people who have worked FOR or WITH him:

With weeks to go before the decisive D.C. Democratic mayoral primary, the city’s political establishment seems to have decided that the election boils down to a referendum on the personality of the incumbent, Adrian Fenty.

Unfortunately for the mayor, his fellow pols aren’t debating whether Fenty has a personality problem. Rather, they’re arguing about how to best describe that problem. To pick just three of the terms thrown around during this unhappy summer of lopsided straw polls and campaign-trail boo-birds, the options include “arrogant prick,” “brat,” and “spoiled child.”

“His politics are unnecessarily abrasive, confrontational, disrespectful, superficial,” says At-Large Councilmember Phil Mendelson, who was on the council during Fenty’s six years there and has continued as a councilmember during Fenty’s four years as a mayor.

“I think his social skills have a lot of room for improvement,” says Ward 7 Councilmember Yvette Alexander. “It’s gotten completely out of control.”

Other choice quotes and stories from the article about Fenty:

One police officer who has helped provide security for the mayor on several occasions says Fenty acts friendly to officers when there are other people around. But when it’s just Fenty or his confidantes, the mayor acts “very pompous and very much an ass,” rarely bothering to acknowledge the security guys’ presence. (The officer’s union, the Fraternal Order of Police, has endorsed Gray.)

In Fenty’s own office, current and former lower-level staffers call him a “moody” boss. One says he became so accustomed to Fenty’s angry side that he could see the mayor’s rage coming by watching for the throbbing of a vein in his head. “He runs his ship by fear; people are afraid of him,” says one staffer. “He’s one of the biggest assholes I’ve ever met in my life.”

Several sources said Fenty has a ferocious temper. Last December, according to multiple sources, Fenty kicked a trash can, slammed a door, and screamed, “I’m the fucking mayor,” after learning that some much-hated New Jersey Avenue NW billboards were being removed without his being present for a photo-op. A Fenty campaign spokesman disputes the details of that event. The mayor also got worked up when he heard that LeBron James was in town and his staff hadn’t arranged for Fenty to meet with the basketball star, according to sources.

One former staffer likened working for Fenty to being an “abused wife,” constantly fighting a losing battle to make the mayor happy. The one time Fenty gave him a compliment, it came as such a shock that he called his significant other to tell her that maybe the mayor wasn’t such a bad guy, after all.

I think the way his detractors feel about Fenty can be summed up by this quote:

“I’d vote for a little dead bug before I’d vote for Fenty,” said a retired school teacher at a recent Ward 7 straw poll.

You know, you can tell a lot about a person by how they treat others.

That Fenty is an asshole and bully says a lot about him.

It definitely shows why he picked another asshole and a bully like Michelle Rhee to run the school system.

It also shows why assholes and bullies like Michael Bloomberg, Cory Booker and Joel Klein support Fenty.

I know that his supporters say that sometimes you have to be an asshole and a bully to break the status quo and get things done.

But that's just jive.

Fenty isn't acting like an asshole and a bully because he wants to break the status quo and get things done.

He acts like an asshole and a bully because he IS an asshole and a bully.

The same goes for Rhee.

A Nation Subsisting On An Elaborate Check-Bouncing Scheme

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

During an other-wise deathly boring year spent covering this debate, I learned to derive some entertainment from watching politicians scramble to give floor speeches about financial reform without disclosing the fact that they didn't have the first fucking clue what a credit-default swap is, or how a derivative works. This was certainly true of Democrats, but the Republicans were way, way better at it. Their strategy was brilliant in its simplicity: Don't even bother trying to figure out the math-y stuff, and instead just blame the entire crisis on government efforts to make homeowners of lazy black people. "Private enterprise mixed with social engineering" was how Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama put it, with a straight face, not long before the bill passed.

The argument favored by Wall Street lobbyists and Obama's team of triangulating pro-business Democrats was more subtle. In this strangely metaphysical version of recent history, the economy was ­ruined by bad luck and a few bad actors, not by any particular law or policy. It was the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument expanded to cover global financial fraud. "There is an assumption that math is evil," insisted Keith Hennessey, a member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, at a hearing in June. "Credit-default swaps are things, and things can't be culprits."

Both of these takes were engineered to avoid an uncomfortable political truth: The huge profits that Wall Street earned in the past decade were driven in large part by a single, far-reaching scheme, one in which bankers, home lenders and other players exploited loopholes in the system to magically transform subprime home borrowers into AAA investments, sell them off to unsuspecting pension funds and foreign trade unions and other suckers, then multiply their score by leveraging their phony-baloney deals over and over. It was pure ­financial alchemy – turning ­manure into gold, then spinning it Rumpelstiltskin-style into vast profits using complex, mostly unregulated new instruments that almost no one outside of a few experts in the field really understood. With the government borrowing mountains of Chinese and Saudi cash to fight two crazy wars, and the domestic manufacturing base mostly vanished overseas, this massive fraud for all intents and purposes was the American economy in the 2000s; we were a nation subsisting on an elaborate check-­bouncing scheme.

And it was all made possible by two major deregulatory moves from the Clinton era: the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which allowed investment banks, insurance companies and commercial banks to merge, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which ­exempted the entire derivatives market from federal regulation. Together, these two laws transformed Wall Street into a giant casino, allowing commercial banks to act like high-risk hedge funds, with a whole new galaxy of derivative bets to lay action on. In fact, the laws made Wall Street even crazier than a casino, because in a casino you have to put up actual money to make bets. But thanks to deregulation, financial companies like AIG could bet billions, if not trillions, without having any money at all to back up their gambles.

Dodd-Frank was never going to be a meaningful reform unless these two fateful Clinton-era laws – commercial banks gambling with taxpayer money, and unregulated derivatives being traded in the dark – were reversed. The story of how the last real shot at reining in Wall Street got routed tells you everything you need to know about how, and on whose behalf, our government works. It was Congress at its most cowardly, deceptive best, with both parties teaming up to subject reform to death by a thousand paper cuts – with the worst cuts coming, literally, in the final moments before the bill's passage.

Sigh.

And of course Obama or whichever ed deform asshole in power at the next meltdown will somehow blame the public school system when this all blows up again.

You know the jive - kids don't have the skills, need more college degrees, if we don't do something about teachers unions soon Sri Lanka will be ahead of us, yada, yada, yada...

Bob Herbert wrote this sort of drivel in his latest Times column (no link - if you want to subject yourself to Herbert, go find it yourself.)

Never mind that NONE of the current economic problems the country faces has to do with the public education system.

NOT ONE.

The problem is EXACTLY as Taibbi lays it out:

Control over the economy in the past dec­ade was ceded to a small group of rapacious criminals who to this day are engaged in a mind-­numbing campaign of theft on a global scale

And those same rapacious criminals have bought the politicians in both parties or themselves have bought political positions (e.g., Bloomberg) and so nothing gets done anymore that does not keep the banksters in power and flush with cash.

It's a shame assholes like Bob Herbert are either too stupid or too corrupt to see through the jive and tell the truth.